Saturday, 6 June 2015

Cavafy and English Decadence

Constantine Cavafy’s adolescence in
England has long been buried in obscurity; and much of his creative life in
Alexandria has been unexplained.But now
we have a work of literary criticism backed by genealogy and solid
ethnography.The revelations are startling
yet suddenly everything falls into place.

Maria Zambaco scandalised London society when she appeared nude in Burne-Jones' Phyllis and Demophoon.

In revealing Cavafy’s exposure to aestheticism in England and linking it
to the decadence of his poetry, Peter Jeffreys in his forthcoming book Reframing Decadence has done more than follow a literary
thread; he has shown how Cavafy was literally a child of these movements.I have been reading Reframing Decadence in proof; when it is published in October by Cornell University Press it will enlarge and transform the way we see Cavafy.

Peter Jeffrey's
remarkable new book.

The Cavafys were tied by marriage, baptism
and business through three generations to other leading Greek merchant families
settled in England early in the nineteenth century.In London Cavafy’s wealthy extended family
were patrons of the arts.Their women
were friends, models and lovers of such avant garde figures as Edward
Burne-Jones, James McNeil Whistler, Dante Gabriel Rosetti and Algernon Charles
Swinburne, and some were also artists in their own right.

Venus modelled by Maria
Zambaco in Laus Veneris
by Burne-Jones.

The theme of depravity resulting from
over-indulgence runs through Cavafy’s erotic poetry – a theme Cavafy would have
encountered with some immediacy, to give just one example, in Burne-Jones’ painting Laus Veneris based on Swinburne’s poem of the same name where the
model for the thwarted goddess of myth was Cavafy’s own cousin, the magnificent
Maria Zambaco, the notoriously spurned mistress of Burne-Jones – ‘With loves
burnt out and unassuaged desires’.

As Jeffreys himself writes, the avant garde
aesthetes ‘comprise a genealogy equally as important to our understanding of
Cavafy as that of his own family, if not even more significant’.

By the time Burne-Jones had finished his
painting the Cavafys had lost all their money and returned to Alexandria and a
life of genteel indigence.

Cavafy in Alexandria in 1901.

From E M
Forster we have the image of Cavafy in a straw hat standing at an angle to the
universe, a man alone in a city which would soon cease to be a universe at all.

But in recovering Cavafy’s English years
Jeffreys has shown how they gave shape to the poet’s technique and sensibility
and directed his art for the rest of his life.

With this new advance, Jeffreys is well on his way towards a
comprehensive literary biography of Constantine Cavafy.

About Me

I am a writer, historian and biographer who lives in London, England. My books are published by Yale University Press, Profile Books, Harper Collins, The American University in Cairo Press, and others. Also see my website.